Five Years a Writer

  I recently participated in a challenge* to write one 100-word micro memoir every day for five days; each day had a theme that we were encouraged to use as the springboard for our writing. The genre was creative nonfiction, so this challenge was not about inventing stories, but, rather, about going deep into our memory banks to pull on the thread of experiences, big or small, from which to weave stories. If I were to summarize the five stories I wrote, it could go something like this: Once upon a time there was a girl named Amanda, who grew up with cats, so, as an adult, she always had at least one cat in her life. She was good at languages and because she was only 17 when she graduated from high school, she went to France to work as an au pair before returning to Canada to attend university. That first degree got her into a post-graduate journalism program, which she really enjoyed. While she never worked as a front-line journalist, her training became the foundation of her own w...